a a a you you Thank you, dear. If you would turn with me to Genesis chapter 8, verse 20. Genesis 8, verse 20. Before we dive in here, allow me to pray. Heavenly Father, as we go back into your word from Matthew to the opening book, of Genesis as we look at these events immediately following the Flood Lord. We would ask that you would give us the eyes to see, the ears to hear, a heart to receive and understand your word. That you would be the one at work in and through these words, work upon our hearts, work upon our minds, work upon our lives, that we would more and more reflect the mindset, the gloriousness, the very image and character of Christ, which is ours in Christ Jesus, our Lord, in whom we pray. Amen. Well, if you would follow along with me, Genesis chapter 8, beginning in verse 20, down through 9, 17. Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and took some of every clean animal and some of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, I will never again curse the ground because of man. For the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, sea time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease. And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the flesh of the sea. And to your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. But you shall not eat flesh with its life that is its blood. And for your lifeblood, I will require a reckoning. For every beast, I will require it. And for man, from his fellow man, I'll require a reckoning for the life of man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed. For God made man in his own image. And you, be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it.' Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, Behold, I establish my covenant with you and your offspring after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the livestock, and every beast of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark, and as for every beast of the earth. I established my covenant with you that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth. And God said, this is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you for all future generations. I have set my bow in the cloud and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh. And the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth. God said to Noah, And this is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth." This is the word of the Lord. So we're back again. I'm back. Seems to be just about once a month here for the last several weeks, several months. Here we are, the conclusion of the flood in many ways. Noah's exited the ark. We've seen before the flood here, sin multiplying upon the earth, the waters rising up, covering the earth, God intervening them, receding, a new creation of sorts appearing. But as we come to the end, after this whole fiasco has occurred, you sort of have to stop for a second and ask yourself, OK, here we are, Genesis chapter 9. What has all of this actually accomplished? I mean, we met Noah early on, all the way back in chapter 5. What's actually transpired? How in the world is God's plan of salvation? What has human history done in these last several chapters? And it would actually appear nothing. On the surface, when we look at where Noah is, what the problem of sin is still developing upon the earth, nothing's actually really changed. But what we do see very clearly here in chapter 9 and the end of chapter 8, is the way in which God will bring forward his plan to establish a kingdom to see his glory proclaimed upon the earth and salvation accomplished for his people. The flood comes about only two, three chapters before because sin has multiplied on the earth. God has seen it. He understands that the very thoughts and the very intentions of our hearts are evil, evil from our youth, our very infancy. The consequence, the appropriate judgment of that is death. We've marred the image of God in ourselves. By sinning, we essentially commit spiritual suicide. We must give to God an accounting, a reckoning for our own life. And as a result, he demands of us our death. But if the flood had actually accomplished anything, Noah would be able to walk out of the ark. Here we are. The earth has been whitewashed. Everything's set free. Tell me to be fruitful and multiply, and let's just go. I'm going to do what Adam failed to accomplish in the garden. But instead, when Noah gets off the ark, he builds an altar. He builds an altar and offers burnt sacrifices, whole burnt offerings, as it's indicated here, vocabulary, a word that's used in the Old Testament for sacrifices given voluntarily for the atonement of sins. Noah's still a sinner. Noah's families are still sinners. Sin's still abounding on the earth. We see in chapter 9 and verses 1 and 7 as well that God's instructions for his people don't necessarily seem to have changed dramatically. I mean, what did God tell Adam in the garden? Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Here, Noah and his children are receiving the same commandment. We're kind of still just chugging along. I mean, you basically could kind of in some sense, tear out everything between Genesis 3 and Genesis 9 here. And there hasn't been a dramatic change of sorts. We haven't seen anything coming about. But what is revealed here, not just simply in the fact that sin still plagues the human race, but how God begins to deal with them. Because God has remembered Noah. God relents in the flood from wiping out all of humanity because of Noah's righteousness. God still remembers, recalls his promises of Genesis 3.15 that it's not going to be by a cataclysmic flood, but by the victory of the seed of the woman conquering Satan, sin, and death itself. And so what does God do here with Noah? Well, he receives sacrifices. He actually accepts them. Now, don't mistake this as some sort of mechanical, automatic, if I cobble together some sort of altar here in Woodstock of unhewn stones and I throw a couple stakes on there, God's going to forgive my sins. You actually see people doing this later on in the Old Testament. And God doesn't receive their sacrifices. The sacrifices here of animals, of these whole burnt offerings, of birds, and of all the other beasts is actually simply an opportunity for God to display his mercy and his grace towards his people. He continues on in displaying that mercy by then blessing Noah, blessing Noah, a sinner, and his sons and commanding them to continue on the very purpose, the very goal, the very established identity that Adam is given in the garden, to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth with God's image bearers, that he would be glorified in all the earth, not simply just in the garden or here outside of the ark. But what really becomes crystal clear and groundbreaking in this conclusion, in many ways, of the flood account is what God does next. He enters into, he establishes a covenant with all of the creation. And so very clearly begins a pattern in the Old Testament from Adam and Noah to the calling and the confirmation of Abraham, to the patriarchs, to Mount Sinai and Exodus, to the whole book of Deuteronomy. repeated in the books of Joshua, to David in his line specifically in 2 Samuel 7 and 1 Chronicles 15, and proclaimed in the prophets in Jeremiah 31 and on, that God begins to explain how he's going to deal with the presence and the issue of sin here upon the earth, and yet his holy reality, his righteousness that demands justice, And the answer is that God's going to willfully bind himself by his own covenant to display his mercy and relent from executing justice and judgment upon his people. Because God was perfectly right, only a couple chapters before, to exact a reckoning and a counting from Adam, from any one of us, for our sins, and accounting and reckoning from us the life that we've essentially taken from God. But what God does here is he tells, he reminds Noah, listen, I've established, I've hinted at how I'm going to bring about the solution to the problem of sin. I've accepted sacrifices of these animals on behalf as a substitute of a life for what I should have from you. I promised to Adam and Eve in the garden that I was going to send the seed of the woman your dad thought might be you, that you would be the one to bring rest to his people from their labors. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take on this covenant, this contract of sorts, bind myself to you, and basically give you an assurance, a guarantee that this isn't how I'm going to bring about the solution to the problem of sin. It's not going to be by a cataclysmic flood. I'm going to willfully restrain myself that you might be an object of my mercy and my grace. And this begins in many ways for Noah, it's only a microcosm. He only gets a foretaste of really what's to come and the outflowing of scripture. Noah here is offering up sacrifices of every clean bird, of every clean animal coming out of the ark. He's not actually offering the appropriate sacrifice. Because one of the things that God goes on to instruct Noah when he tells him to be fruitful and multiply is that punishments require an exact price. We all have car insurance, Lord willing, if you drove here this evening. If you go out this evening and you get into an auto wreck, the person or someone hits you, for that car to be fixed, you don't mail the other person a fruit basket and sort of consider it all taken care of. You have car insurance. An assessor comes out. They say, this is the exact dollar amount of the damage that was done to this car. and repairs to that degree are taken. I mean, they do it down to the penny. It's an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a dent for a dent. In the same way here, if this is the principle upon which in many ways Western law is founded, but upon which Noah is to conduct this being fruitful and multiplying, How does that sacrifice work? How is every clean animal and every clean bird somehow serving as a sacrifice for the image of God being marred in Noah's own life by his sin? We see already here in the very early glimpses of altars and sacrifices and covenants that there's something that doesn't line up. There's something amiss here. Noah's sacrifices aren't actually atoning for his sins. It's God's mercy and his covenants that seem to be delaying things. Noah isn't in a sinless state as Adam was. He can actually be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth as Adam was commanded. He's actually relying on that covenant of God, relenting his own destruction that allows his obedience. And this is the very thing that Scripture then unfolds when we get to Matthew, when we get to the book of Philippians, that it's through these covenants and these very principles that our salvation appears. It's in Christ offering a once-for-all sacrifice. a sinless human life for another human, fully man, fully as flesh and blood as every single one of us in here is today, with every one of our frailties and weaknesses, yet without sin. But it's him actually finally offering a sacrifice that actually can atone for sin, that we're saved. It's in Him, willfully, by the offer, the free gift of grace, by faith, binding Himself once more to a sinful people and offering us the gift of faith that we would believe, that we would become heirs with Christ, receive the inheritance rightfully due Him, but a gift of God's grace to us. It's a forgiveness and a washing over of our sins that the blood of all of these animals never could accomplish, but the blood of Christ does for each and every one of us. It's then in the fulfillment of that covenant, the new covenant that we celebrate. You guys have the same pattern that we do in East Brookfield. Next Sunday, you'll be celebrating the Lord's Supper. Not a rainbow, but bread, and juice, bread and wine, commemorating the very sacrifice of Christ, a sign of that covenant there as well. And it's our life as believers still that hinges not on our own works, to allow us to be fruitful and multiply, not only in our numbers, but also in our maturity, in our relationships with one another. in our sanctification and understanding of the gospel, that it's by the God's grace that he has covenanted with us in his Son, that each and every one of us now is looking forward to the new heavens and the new earth, when we actually can be fruitful and multiply, when now, as many of these prayer requests tonight were for, to see God's work through his Spirit in the lives of those around us. that there would be those who would belong to him, that we would see his kingdom come, not just in a complete destruction, in a Lord, please come state of the book of Revelation, but actually seeing it manifested in Woodstock and in central Vermont, and our families and our households. It's because we rely on God as Noah is relying here on God, not because of sacrifices of animals because of his own righteousness or his own works, but because God is a covenant-keeping God, because God is faithful and merciful to us. It's our salvation that begins to dawn here in the pages of Genesis, not in a cataclysmic flood, but a God who's willing to relent and hold off his judgment, because he knows, as we've just been celebrating, and as some of you may have a countdown app on your smartphone, Christmas is coming, not in 362 days or whatever it is, but in centuries down the road, that a time is coming when the penalty for sin will be paid, when Noah, when we actually are cleansed of our sins, and when God can bless us truly through Jesus Christ, his Son. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we give you thanks that it's not through floods It's not through marches through deserts and new contracts and new nation-states that our salvation comes, but by, while we were still sinners, that Christ died for us. That you mercifully chose to restrain your wrath, your justice, your judgment, and would choose us. That you would bind us to yourself, love us, that we might have an inheritance with Christ. Father, as we face the challenges of life as believers, I would ask that you would allow each and every one of us to be reminded that our identity, our purpose, our foundation, and our calling as Christians all hinges on one simple thing. You are a covenant-keeping God. and that you have paid the penalty for our sins in the blood of Jesus Christ, that our hearts might be changed, that our lives might be transformed, and that our worship might be focused solely and absolutely on you in everything that we think, in everything that we say, and in everything that we do. And it's your sons that we pray. Amen.